How to Teambuild on ARB And Score the Highest
Yes, even if you can’t read Japanese because I can’t either
Hey y’all, it’s Picklesz and here I am for a post I don’t think has been made yet! Although I can find some translations I don’t think anybody has made a guide on how to score the highest in this game, and with the advent of tiering — or you just want to high score contest all the songs — I think this may be helpful for newcomers or people who simply don’t know what the card skills mean (it took me a while to memorize them all too). And has someone who has played the game since day one, I know my way around things :)
Disclaimer that this is based on my own research from playing the game for over a year and figuring out what's good myself although I think I am right
Anyways, on with the guide!
What Actually Matters?
In ARB, there are a few things that matter when you build a team, some way more important than others. Namely, there are three things. In order of most importance:
1. Leader Skill
This is clearly the most important. Leader skill determines how much of a stat boost you will get, and some of them won't apply unless you meet certain criteria (but more on that later).
2. Auto Skill
Auto Skill determines what boost you get while playing a song. These can either make passing the song easier or increase your score: obviously you want increasing your score if you want to score the highest.
3. Stat Synergy with the Leader Skill
The least important but should at least be mentioned. Leader skills can boost one, two, or three stats (though there's only two cards in the game that I know of that increase three stats). If you get late game, you'll want to have all your cards in your team to have their highest stat/stats be the one that the leader increases.
I will be going over all these in depth! So lets start with the most important one.
Leader Skills
Leader skills are the first thing you need to think about when building your team. Generally, there are only two leader skills that you want when building your team: multi-division and division only. These skills, however, have specific requirements; if you don't meet them, your skill will not activate. Multi-division requires that the cards on your team be from three or more divisions, while division only requires that all your cards be from the same division.
These skills are the best skills because they have a higher boost than all up and division up (division only and division up are different). If your leader skill is maxed, multi-division and division only will boost your stats by 120% while all up and division up will only be 90%. Even their level one are better, so unless you have a maxed all up card and not a multi-division/division only, you should always be using one of those two skills.
Examples of the skills:
The text on the right side of the slash signifies what type of leader skill it is, this one multi-division. Notice how the text below has 120% in it...
While this card only has 90%. This skill is all up, and as stated earlier is less than either multi-division or division only adds up to.
So when it comes to division up and division only, how can you tell the difference? This card is an MTC only card. Notice how it has character after MTC...
While this one does not. This one is simple division only, division being MTC on this one. These type of cards will all have their division abbreviation to tell you which one it is (BB, MTC, FP, M, BAT, and DH).
So, how do you upgrade these cards to get to the 120% percent? Well, there's two ways: star pieces and leader skill tokens.
Star pieces you can use on any card! You can get them from tiering in events and in the biscuit shop once a month. However, you can only get the gold biscuits to buy them from selling SSRs and SRs, so I recommend selling dupes from the event box that you don't want to get these and use them on cards you do want.
Leader skill tokens you can also use on any card but there is no way to actually get them. You have to wait until ARB decides to give them out, usually on half-anniversary or anniversary - that's the only time we've got them in the past.
One last thing: in the long run, you want a leader skill that increases one stat only. This is because the boost stacks much better when it increase one stat by 120% rather than two stats by 60% (all stats doesn't exist on any multi-division or division only card so don't worry about it). You can tell if it increases one or two stats, because one stat will say 120% in the description while two stats will say 60%. However it's really not a big deal unless you really need those few thousand extra points and you have like. Ten maxed cards so you can afford to be picky.
Auto Skills
The bread and butter of your team. While you only need one card to have a good leader skill, ideally every member of your team will have a good auto skill that boosts your score (from here on out, I will be referring to score boosts as simply boosts).
So what is a good auto skill? Well, if you're just starting out, it's any skill that scores, but if you want to score the highest there are four specific skills you want: critical tap, combo boost, perfect boost, and tap boost. Don't worry, I will actually be at least briefly going over every auto skill because there are a LOT and being able to recognize the text for each one is important (although unfortunately due to the ten image limit I can only show pictures of the best ones 😭). So in order of best to worst, here are all the auto skills!
Critical Tap
Look for 4% in the auto skill description!
Easily the best auto skill. It gives you a 4% boost on all notes, with the caveat of being the timing on notes gets stricter. You can disregard that because it literally does not matter if you get a perfect or not when you are getting a 4% boost on every note you tap and if you're reading this guide you're probably getting full combo anyways. This the the highest boost you can get on every single note so having at least one of these is amazing.
Combo Boost
Look for 3% in the auto skill description!
Basically a poor mans critical tap. You get a 3% boost on all notes as you as you keep your combo. Again, most of y'all are probably getting full combo anyways and if not you can always use the autoplay cassettes!
Perfect Boost
Look for the word "perfect" and 3% in the description!
A poor mans combo boost (see the pattern here?). You get a 3% boost on all notes as long as they are perfects. You probably shouldn't use this with critical tap if you don't get a lot of perfects as the timing gets harder but it still is the third best auto skill.
Tap Boost
Look for 1% followed by 3% in the description!
Lastly, the poor mans perfect boost. You get a 1% boost on all notes except tap notes; you get a 3% boost on tap notes. As the overwhelming majority of notes are tap notes, you can essentially disregard the 1% part unless you are playing Ore Ga Ichiro which I swear has a flick note every other note.
Those are the best auto skills in the game, however there are many others. I'll go over them all briefly here :)
Scratch Note Boost
Look for 2% followed by 6% in the description!
You get a 2% boost on all notes except scratch notes; you get a 6% boost on scratch notes. The 6% boost sounds nice except you rarely have scratch notes so uh. 2% boost on all notes is not very good.
btw the green notes are scratch notes if you didn't know
Long Note Boost
Look for 2% followed by 3% in the description!
You get a 2% boost on all notes except long notes; you get a 3% boost on long notes. This doesn't even have a niche because you can literally get a 3% boost on every note with combo or perfect and a 4% boost with critical tap. Literally what were they thinking when they made this skill. Don’t use it.
Flick Note Boost
Look for 2% followed by 15% in the description!
You get a 2% boost on all notes except flick notes; you get a 15% boost on flick notes. That sounds nice until you again remember you rarely have flick notes except when playing Ore Ga Ichiro Part A. In fact, some songs like Sensenfunkuukou Part A (god I hope I spelled that right, Jiro's first solo if I didn't) don't have a single flick note in it despite the fact they give this skill to every Buster Bro event card I swear. So really just stay away from this one too.
Perfect Up
Don't look for anything this skill sucks 😭 but for real this skill will simply have the word "perfect" in the description.
PLESE DO NOT USE THIS SKILL UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE. This skill makes all of your notes perfects. It does NOT score at all. If you are aiming to score obviously you do not want a skill that doesn't not score. I am so sorry if you rerolled for ARB Riou or Dice back in the day because they both have this skill and it SUCKS and does NOTHING.
Um. Anyways. Here're info on how to upgrade skills and what they do!
You can upgrade your skills with either skill tokens or rainbow auto skill tokens. Upgrading your auto skill makes your skill last for longer whenever it activates and will have a shorter time in between activations, so you definitely want to upgrade them.
You can buy skill tokens in the event shop, biscuit shop, or coin shop. You need three mic tokens and ten attribute tokens for every level, and once you hit level 5, you need specific division tokens as well. It is pretty expensive but it does get easier over time to stockpile.
The rainbow auto skill token you can only get either when they give them out OR you completely empty the event box of the rate up card. Once you do that, they replace the rate up card with the rainbow auto skill token. You have to either be ridiculously lucky in the box or spend every minute in the game or both to do this, but it is possible.
Now that that long section is over, on to the last part of this guide!
Stat Synergy with Your Leader Skill
As alluded to earlier, you eventually want all your cards highest stats to be the stat your leader skill boosts. Honestly, you should NOT worry about this until you have several maxed auto skill cards and a maxed leader skill to use it with. But for those who are at that point, here's an example of the stat synergy I am talking about.
These teams technically have the same skills (the Jyuto and Riou card I switched have the same auto skills). In fact, on paper the second team should score higher because I've upgraded the Jyuto card's leader skill so his power score is higher than Riou's. But because their stats are different, the Riou card actually works better on this team because it works better in line with the leader skill and leads to the teams ultimate power score being 2,000 points higher, a pretty noticeable difference.
The case is not always so clear cut, because, well, not all cards have the same auto skill. But if you want to score the highest, especially if you are tiering, you will want to keep this in mind.
So how do you figure out the trade-off between stats and skill when the cards you are switching don't have the same auto skill? Honestly, you just have to play a no attribute song twice and find out :( I don't have a surefire way to track this. In my experience if you are debating between two cards and one of them is Riou the Riou card always scores higher. I do not know why and that is probably just me because I own all of his event cards but uh. Put Riou card on your team :)
Anyways! To increase your stats you actually have to enhance the leader skill of your card. Those ways were outlined earlier, but this part of the guide is why I actually recommend you enhance event cards of characters with good auto skills that you KNOW you are going to use. If they have a good auto skill you can get a max card with maxed stats for free! Again I would not do this unless they have auto skill and you WILL use them since it takes a lot of time but it is totally worth it.
That's all for my teambuilding guide! If you guys would like to see more guides on ARB I am more than happy to make more! Feel free to send my any questions through my ask or reblog and ask :) Take care!